It’s a new year (fine, yes, it’s February) and what better way to kick it off than by announcing the 4.0 release of our Rhapsody Android app! This release is killer, featuring complete rewrites of our player, queue, Bluetooth handling and audio focus, a new screen for artist tracks in your library, queue reorder, playlist editing, and WOW we’re so ready for you to have it. I can’t even tell you how stoked we are to put this in your hands. Really. So much of what we’re pushing out today is all about your requests. Let’s do this…

Order! Order please!

In the 3.0 release we removed the ability to reorder your queue. Honestly, it was so clunky, tedious, and painful to use we thought nobody would suffer through it. Well, we were mistaken. We heard from many of you that you really wanted this functionality back. But we couldn’t just put it back the way it was, no way. We had to do better – so we rewrote it. Today you can now edit your queue with a great drag and drop interface. By the way, we enabled this for your playlists, too. From the queue you can either tap your hardware menu button (or if you’re on a newer device, the overflow menu in the Action Bar – that’s the three dots on the right side at the top of the screen) and choose “Edit queue.” On a playlist just tap the plus button and choose “Edit playlist.” Enjoy!

Queue it up
Since we rewrote the queue, we took more of your feedback to heart and we also removed the queue limit, something more than a couple of you found frustrating. You’re no longer capped to 800 songs in your queue at a time.

Lock it up
Carrying on with the theme of customer feature requests, another feature you’ve been asking for is lock screen controls. If you’re on Android 4.0 or greater, you’ve got ’em, even if your OS is skinned, i.e. HTC Sense, Motoblur, Samsung Touchwiz, and so on.

Play nice
Often times, the best improvements are the ones you don’t notice, and we’d really just like you to enjoy your playback experience. It wasn’t easy to hear, but we know that playback wasn’t always awesome for some customers. We’ve made changes along the way and things got better for a lot of folks, but some issues just persisted. We knew it was time to address this because you can’t rock if it doesn’t roll.

We’re so excited to announce that we have completely rewritten our player from the back to the front. It’s kind of funny, this is the biggest thing we’ve done in this release but it can be summed up as “playback just works.” With Rhapsody 4.0 you should now experience less delay starting playback, drastically fewer stalls and skips, and in general it is just way more stable.

Speaking of playing music, don’t forget that Rhapsody also integrates with Ford Sync so you can have your music at your fingertips in your car!

Encore
Some things you may have missed from our last few 3.x releases…
– Swipe in Now Playing to go to the next or previous track
– Shuffle and Repeat, up front and center on Now Playing (moved from Settings)
– Replay: what you listened to when you listened to it

Preview
Over the next couple of releases we’ll bring you:
– Killer music articles written by our editorial team
– Performance improvements to the rest of the app
– UI refresh
– More customer feature requests
– Surprises 🙂

Beta programs
This year our goal is to run beta releases as often as we can to get new features out in the field before a general public release. If you want early access to the newest features, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Get Satisfaction and keep an eye out for calls for beta testers.

And speaking of betas…

Shout outs
My team and I want to extend our gratitude to the 100+ customers who participated in our open beta of the 4.0 release. Over 4 weeks you tested, used, abused, poked, prodded, stressed, and blended* not one but two drops from us. You sent us feedback, bug reports, and of course, even more feature requests** and put up with a lot of back and forth with us as we worked through it all. For this, we thank you.

*=ok, maybe not blended.
**=we’ll get to them!

We want to hear from you!
If you experience problems, let us know. Go to Settings in the Rhapsody app and tap on the feedback link. You’ll be able to send us email directly. Yes, us, the Android Team. If you’re reporting a problem, the more information you can provide, the better.

If you’re feeling social, you can follow me on G+ or Twitter and I’ll post updates and info as frequently as I can.

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